Peter Canavese’s “The Counselor” Goes for the Jugular

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With a subject as full of over-the-top violence as the film The Counselor, a review with a corresponding level of violence is sometimes in order. Peter Canavese’s “The Counselor” is just such a review, attacking its subject with bloody abandon.

Canavese doesn’t waste time with didacticism, but instead opens the review by firing warning shots across The Counselor’s bow. “Look out,” Canavese seems to say, “I’m coming for you.”

And come for the movie he does, unloading clip after clip of bullets made of adjectives. Canavese finds little to love about The Counselor, and that makes him an efficient assassin.

One might wonder of a critic who writes for a site called Groucho Reviews: is this all a shtick? Is Canavese just attacking the film as part of his persona as a “groucho?” This question is irrelevant, though, as he backs up his attacks with solid reasoning. Whether or not he truly loathes this film, he makes a sold case for loathing it.

By the time Canavese is done with “The Counselor,” the ground is littered with corpses. The corpse with the most bullets in it is that of screenwriter Cormac McCarthy, on whom Canavese pins most of the blame for the film. Whether or not that’s fair, it is devastatingly effective.